Amazon to add second Vancouver office and 1,000 more jobs by 2020

Amazon to add second Vancouver office and 1,000 more jobs by 2020

While Amazon has yet to reveal where in North America its second headquarters will be, the Seattle headquartered ecommerce behemoth has got Canadians excited by announcing it’s opening a second corporate office in Vancouver — and planning to double its staff headcount in the city, adding 1,000 additional jobs by 2020.

Reuters suggests the move is in response to the US tightening immigration conditions — noting that Canada launched a fast-track visa program for highly skilled workers in June.

The Vancouver Sun reports that the 1,000 new jobs will be a mix of tech and non-tech jobs, including software development, human resources and marketing roles.

Amazon’s first office in Vancouver opened in 2015, and now employs more than 1,000 mostly software engineers, according to the paper.

At a launch event Friday, Jesse Dougherty, Amazon’s Vancouver site lead, was asked about HQ2 but said he had “no information” about it. (But, given the corporate office announcement, it is presumably one city that can be pretty safely chalked off the HQ2 list.)

Hundreds of cities have submitted proposals to be considered as a location for Amazon HQ2. Unsurprisingly given the company has said it expects to invest more than $5BN in construction and grow HQ2 to “as many as 50,000 high-paying jobs”, though it’s not clear over what time period those jobs will be created.

Amazon says it has more than 380,000 employees worldwide at this point.